Download Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions?: Jesus, Revelation and Religious Traditions AudioBook Free
Arguably, the church's biggest challenge in the next century will be the challenge of the scandal of particularity. As part of your before, Christians will need to clarify why they follow Jesus and not the Buddha or Confucius or Krishna or Muhammed. But if, while relating their beliefs to the faiths, Christians treat non-Christian religions as netherworlds of unmixed darkness, the church's subject matter will be a scandal not of particularity but of arrogant obscurantism. // Recent evangelical introductions to the challenge of other religions have built commendably on foundations laid by J. N. D. Anderson and Stephen Neill. Anderson and Neill exposed the "heathen" worlds to the evangelical Western world, showing that many non-Christians also seek salvation and also have personal relationships using their gods. In the last 10 years Clark Pinnock and John Sanders have argued for an inclusivist knowledge of salvation, and Harold Netland has shed new light on the question of truth in the religions. Yet no evangelicals have focused--as nonevangelicals Keith Ward, Diana Eck and Paul Knitter have done--on the revelatory value of truth in non-Christian religions. Anderson and Neill confirmed that there are limited convergences between Christian and non-Christian practices, and Pinnock has argued that there could be truths Christians can study from spiritual others. But as far as I know, no evangelicals have yet examined the religions in any type of substantive method for what Christians can learn without sacrificing, as Knitter and John Hick do, the finality of Christ. // This reserve is the start of an evangelical theology of the religions that addresses not the question of salvation but the challenge of truth and revelation, and calls for seriously the normative boasts of other practices. It explores the biblical propositions that Jesus is the light that enlightens every person (Jn 1:9) which God has not left Himself without a witness among non-Christian practices (Functions 14:17). It argues that if Saint Augustine learned from Neo-Platonism to better understand the gospel, if Thomas Aquinas learned from Aristotle to better understand the Scriptures, in case John Calvin learned from Renaissance humanism, perhaps evangelicals might be able to study from the Buddha--and other great spiritual thinkers and traditions--things that can help them more plainly understand God's revelation in Christ. It really is an introductory phrase in a conversation that I am hoping goes much further among evangelicals. (Gerald McDermott, in the introduction to Can Evangelicals Study from World Religions?)
